


Intervention: Asgard

by AndrogynyZombie



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Addiction, Drug Use, Gen, Intervention, Methamphetamines, Minor Violence, Therapists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-27
Updated: 2012-03-27
Packaged: 2017-11-02 14:17:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndrogynyZombie/pseuds/AndrogynyZombie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki is addicted to Meth.<br/>This explains pretty much everything about him, ever.<br/>Thor doesn't like meth, but he does like his brother. <br/>Thor is going to fix the problem, TLC Channel style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intervention: Asgard

Loki glared at the camera’s grubby lens, cocking an eyebrow.

“What is that Thor, a damned Super 8 recorder?”

He was holding a small pipe that smelled of several hundred foul chemicals burnt together. He lit it, inhaled, and continued to stare at Thor, pupil’s blown in the grainy- gray image Thor watched from the other side, standing on a secluded, yet grandiose golden balcony in Asgard.

“This is my brother Loki,” Thor said into the recording, crushed, “and recently my companion, Jane, informed me that he is what Midgardians refer to as a “crack-head”.

“Fuck off, Thor,” Loki growled, ramming his fist into the camera.

“Why are you doing the drugs, brother?” Thor asked, the image scrambled.

“I do what I want, THOR!” With that, Loki leaped from the balcony and vanished completely.

TLC’S INTERVENTION  
———————————————

She couldn’t believe she had ever agreed to this. Only the occasional dry, raspy cough broke the silence in the bare room. She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, settled her fidgety hands in her lap with a short huff. This couldn’t be over soon enough.

Warrior Sif and the Ladies Two (and Hogun) had of course been asked to come together. They worked as a bizarre little unit, full of well-meaning dysfunction and bawdy good times. Here, however, they weren’t sure just what it was they were supposed to be doing. Or what it was they even could do. Fandral had settled into stroking his beard in jerky, nervous movements while Volstagg picked incessantly at a depressing little plate of pastries on the coffee table. Sif felt as though the coffee table were an insurmountable gate, hedging the considerable-sized warriors in on the patchy taupe couch.

A diminutive, professional man perched as regally as he could on the only present sagging armchair, leaning over every now and again to pat Thor Odinson encouragingly on the shoulder, murmuring, “You did the right thing, uh, Thor. There’s nothing wrong with reaching out.”

He sounded as though he had been forced to repeat this phrase for several hundred years, a dusty and decrepit corpse of a phrase snaking out of him in an automatic exhale. Thor, doubled over with his hands gripping his Suave-shiny blonde mane, refused to lift his head. Every now again he would shake his head to and fro and emit a high-pitched, canine whining which in turn provoked a pronounced snort from Odin.

The elderly god was crowded onto a pink loveseat with Frigga, arms crossed and monocular glare fixed on a tacky brass frame of horses prancing in a field. His wife glanced helplessly between him and her despondent son, sighing and hugging herself in the tense quiet of the room. They all started when the small, suited man cleared his throat.

“It’s almost three,” he tittered, adjusting his tie and looking everywhere but at Odin, “so let’s just go over some ground rules before he gets here, okay? This is learning experience, we’re all gonna be here to learn, okay, so let’s keep the judgment to a minimum, okay? Just, be honest and loving, but you gotta be firm, too, okay? We’re gonna learn today, and we’re gonna set some healthy boundaries. Everybody, got their letters?”

Like a shamefaced group of sixth graders, Sif and the Warriors pulled a few rumpled, smudged pages from mysterious places in their armor and fidgeted- except Hogun, who seemed to have written just four words on an index card. Thor placed a hand protectively on a ridiculous stack of pages balanced on his knee, finally straightening his back and looking up. Odin tried to cross his arms harder, found them crossed as tightly as possible, and grunted instead.

“Alright! Well let’s all take a deep breath and try to be real calm and cool for when he-“

“-DO WHAT I WANT, HEIMDALL!”

Like a rubber band, the green-armored little man was jettisoned into the room, half-propelled by Heimdall’s considerable strength and half by the almost incandescent energy he burnt with. Loki bumped into the coffee table and stood there, eyes wide, shaking a little. His hair, once glossy and smoothed back like a romantic intellectual, flared out and jutted at odd angles. His eyes were dark and sunken, the pupils blown and wild. Just standing, he was like a scrawny hurricane of potential energy.

“Loki!” the therapist called out, sounding more like a credit company had just shown up to saw off his pinky toe than glad to see his patient, “you made it.”

“What-“ he stammered, looking around like he expected some kind of frost giant, “what is this? What are you all up to?” He wasn’t sure if he was suspicious, excited, or both. He bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, clapping his hands lightly in the stiff silence that followed.

“Loki, we wanted you here today to-“

“Nyaah!”

With that, Loki upended the shabby coffee table and glared. Watching the pastries scatter across the floor, Volstagg managed a cough of indignation before Sif silenced him with her fist.

“Loki, I wasn’t even done telling you why we asked you-“

“Why do you keep doing this to us, brother?!” Thor wailed, doubling over and sobbing into his palms. It would have been unnecessarily theatric for anybody but Thor.

Loki eyed the flipped table and shrugged.

“Doing what?”

The therapist patted Thor’s arm, maybe a little too forcefully, and tried to speak again while the godly Asgardian wept delicately into his hammer.

“Loki, your family wants to discuss your problem.”

“What problem?! Is this about that time with Fenrir? I’m telling you, I’m getting him re-trained-“

“No! No, Loki. This isn’t about Fenrir. This is about your-“

“Is this about Baldr? BECAUSE I APOLOGIZED, HE’S FINE NOW, OK? How was I supposed to know he was allergic to mistletoe?”

“Loki this isn’t about- mistletoe? I mean, uh, Loki, this is about your OTHER problem.”

“For the love of- he’s talking about those vile Midgard spirits you smoke, boy!’

Loki squinted, taking two steps away from the wreckage of coffee-table. He pointed a jittery hand at his tear-stained brother and spluttered, trying to form some kind of sentence. Thor looked uncomfortably similar to a Labrador puppy, biting his lip and trying not to feel guilty.

“I don’t have a problem!” he roared, bloodshot eyes peeled wide.

“Loki,” the therapist said, “maybe it’s time to admit you DO have a problem. A problem with Meth.”   
He pulled out a small manila folder and held up a poster, covered with “Before” and “After” pictures of everyday folks on Meth.

“This is going to be you, Loki. This will be you if you don’t admit you have to stop.”

Thor looked more disturbed than his brother, paling at the sight of the snaggle-toothed waifs on the poster. Loki crossed his arms and looked sullenly out the small window above the therapist’s chair, skinny fingers tapping restlessly on his vibrating form.

“You have beautiful teeth, brother! Why would you want to do this?” Thor was lost in a seizing, sobbing fit. Loki cocked an eyebrow, touching his mouth self-consciously.

“Let’s try, uh, let’s try to calm down? Okay, let’s calm down a little. Loki, why- what are you feeling, right now?”

“I feel like I’m stuck in a room of blubbery imbeciles, scraggly bearded foster dads, and my mother.” He tried to keep his face impassive, but his mouth and eyes twitched in regular intervals. “Could not a single one of you at least have asked ahead of time?”

Frigga tried her best not to smirk; not even Loki at his most acerbic could bring himself to hurt his mother. Sif shifted uncomfortably, watching a suddenly intense stare-down between the scrawny, drug-addled magician and his churlish father.

“Don’t look at me, boy,” Odin barked, turning away, “you can go jump off the Bifrost if it makes you happy, for all I care.” Frigga punched him, mouth slightly agape.

“Yes, I think I recall you proving that statement once before,” Loki hissed, sniffing loudly and pawing at his face.

“Oh are we back to that, then? Are you going to whine some more about how I ‘let you down’? Because you can’t just shut up and deal with things like an adult Asgardian? Oh, that’s right, nevermind.”

Thor and Frigga stared in open disbelief as Loki covered his mouth and turned away.

“No wonder you made such a terrible ‘king’,” the Allfather added under his breath.

“Odin! Please, be quiet. Loki, I think we may have found a real powerful trigger for you here, it seems like you and your dad have a very str-“

Loki wasn’t listening. He had turned back and was staring, somewhere between intent and devastated, at his father’s red-flushed, tight-lipped face. Before Thor or Sif could stop him, he had jumped over the felled coffee table, picked up the slight therapist, and hurled him through the small window in an explosion of glass. Sif ran over to the window, stood on the chair and looked outside, where the therapist lay on the ground, bleeding slightly and unconscious.

“It’s the first floor,” Loki mumbled, his back to the entire gathering, “he’ll be fine.”

She would have cared more, but by all her figuring the little man was doing positively nothing to help. They might as well carry on without him; if he woke up and rejoined them, all the better. Shrugging, she walked back over the couch and slumped down, crumpling her letter. Fishing it out, she brandished it meaningfully at Thor; the last thing she wanted was for this little carnival to carry on longer than necessary. Thor perked back up.

“The letters! My companions, please, we should recite our letters, as the man of Therapeutic Intent had instructed us. Brother, please, will you listen?”

Thor sounded hoarse and desperate. Perhaps that was why Loki only shrugged and stood still, tapping his foot and shaking all over. Thor cleared his throat and began to read off a tear-splattered letter.

“Dear brother, I don’t care if you’re an abomination and an unnatural freak in the eyes of Asgard,” he said, pausing to blow his nose. Loki shuddered violently and tried to cough over his indignant half-sob half-shriek.

“I also do not care if you are chilly and an abnormal shade of blue sometimes, because our father stole you from your true father, who was a monster that you killed, which was the right thing to do, I believe, nor do I care that sometimes you act like a buffoon and a liar. Your use of this- this meth potion the Midgard doctors tell me of is terrible and also bad. You act like even more of a sneaky jester than you usually do and also you punched Fandral really rather hard. You are destructive and somehow faster than usual and also your magic is creepy and strange; I especially did not like the part with the spiders when you became angry with me last week. There are still spiders in my closet and I thought it was particularly unkind that you did not let me stay with you, because I dislike spiders.”

Sif was beginning to regret not having snuck in a flask of some kind of strong spirit; she suddenly couldn’t bring herself to blame Loki for his current addictive proclivities. Thor continued.

“When you tried to kill Heimdall, again, Sif and I and Fandral and also Volstagg and Hogun tried to stop you, but it didn’t work because you were too ensorcelled by your Meth-spirits to feel our blows and this also makes me sad, because you were being terrible to Heimdall and also because we had to hit you, which is terrible. Also I spoke to your son and I think he misses you, although I can’t really tell because your son is a horse and I do not speak the language of horses. All in all, Loki, you are my brother no matter how small a Jotun you are and I love you, and please stop doing this meth. The end.”

By the time he put down his letter, Thor was frantically trying to keep his face clean of tears and failing miserably. He hiccupped sorrowfully, almost drowning out the sound of his father puffing like an angry hedgehog. Loki’s fists were balled and he tried to sprint out of the room, ricocheting off of Heimdall’s chiseled abs; of course Heimdall had been waiting just outside the door for just such an incident.   
“You will stay,” he said, shutting the door with an air of finality.

“Another,” Thor thundered, pounding his fist on the chair’s arm, “the next letter!”

Sif sighed and looked over hers; she supposed she could do Thor this one favor.

“Loki,” she began in monotone, “of all your godly shenanigans this has been the most baffling. As much as I enjoy beating you, you’ve actually managed to make it redundant. Also, you’re a sight more clever than Thor, and you’ve kept us all from getting killed, well, lots of times. So thanks for that. Don’t die, or Thor might accidentally kill us. Begrudgingly, Sif.”

The room was silent, save for the strange choking noises coming from the corner Loki was sitting in. For all they knew, he was taking another hit of meth. Sif shrugged awkwardly, staring pointedly at Fandral and Volstagg. Both of the warriors tried to look occupied with something else. After a rather sharp jab from the Lady, Fandral squirmed and read aloud.

“Loki, you have wonderful hair, it is so very shiny, how do you get it to do that? Also thank you for not letting me die that one time, I guess, that was rather nice of you.”

“Hogun?” Thor ventured hopefully, swinging his wide puppy-eyes towards the grim-faced man, “have you anything to say?”

Hogun sighed, eyeballed his paper critically, crumpled it into his fist.

“Loki- knock it off.”

Thor frowned at the pastry-covered carpet and tried to figure out what to say next. Loki was standing stiff as a tin soldier in his corner, and he was starting to worry that his brother was going to use his strange, effeminate magics to escape. He only had one chance left.

“Father,” Thor said, aiming for confident and getting something closer to hopeless, “say something. Something less terrible than the last thing you have said.”

Frigga nudged him sternly. “Yes, Odin, why don’t you tell our son what you really think of him?”

Odin rolled his eye and sunk back into the sagging loveseat.

“Fine. You want the truth? Loki-“

His father’s voice brought the young man back to attention and he turned, ever so slightly from where he stood.

“-I think you’re a disgrace, and even if you weren’t a great blue excuse for a real monster, you’re a damned lady and pantywaist besides. I favored Thor because he knew the value of a night’s exercise and protein; the only physical fitness you partook of was twirling around a pole like a tarted up tablewhore.”

“IT WAS ACROBATICS,YOU SLAVERING EXCUSE FOR A-“

“Father!” Thor was standing now, gripping Mjolnir. “Loki…is this why you have become a Midgardian “junkie”? Because you feel our father cared for me more because I am a proper warrior?”

Frigga snorted. “And also because your father has the emotional capacity an d intellectual intuition of a drunken, stunted dwarf?”

Odin was apoplectic. “I’M A GREAT FATHER!”

“Yes,” Frigga drawled, staring obstinately out the window, “that’s why you let our son kill himself. Bravo, good show, oh husband mine.”

The old man wilted a bit.

Loki snorted, a wet, burbling sound. Thor stood behind him, biting his lip nervously.

“I just…I just…I just wanted you t-to l-l-ove me!”

Loki’s last syllable dragged out into a high-pitched, trailing whine, while Thor tried awkwardly to embrace his brother. On the couch, Volstagg mimed a closed-fist infantile crying motion while Sif pounded the back of his head until he stopped. Odin stared at his lap, finding that only having one eye made it much easier to pretend you weren’t crying.

“Come, my brother,” Thor said shakily, trying very hard not to sob harder than a housewife during a Lifetime marathon, “you can go to the Center of the Fabled Mistress Ford’s realm, and cleanse yourself of this vile substance. Think of your son! Your freakish, eight-legged offspring needs his fath- mothe- parent!”

Loki relented; hugged his brother wordlessly. Somewhere, in the ethereal distance, the sound of a studio audience crooning could be heard.

When the sirens sounded, no one was sure if it was just the vehicle to cart Loki off to the Betty Ford Center, or an ambulance for the currently forgotten therapist bleeding on the pavement outside. No one much cared, either. They were all crowded in a tightly knit circle of awkward, reluctant, group hug.

\--------

Loki Laufeyson was admitted to the Betty Ford Center as an inpatient later that day. After two whole minutes of intensive treatment, a bizarre bolt of energy tore the complex asunder and the wiry little man escaped.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own TLC's Intervention, and I don't want to. I don't own anything about this. Except the shame.


End file.
